An excerpt from The
Swirl and the Swastika:NutraSweet
& the Military-Medical-Industrial Complex by Alex
Constantine(one of several articles from the book
Psychic Dictatorship in the U.S.A. by Alex Constantine)

The FDA is ever mindful to refer
to aspartame, widely known as NutraSweet, as a "food additive,"
never a "drug." A "drug" on the label of
a Diet-Coke might discourage the consumer. And because aspartame
is classified a food additive, adverse reactions are not reported
to a federal agency, nor is continued safety monitoring required
by law.(1) NutraSweet is a non-nutritive
sweetener. The brand name is a misnomer. Try NonNutraSweet.
Food additives seldom cause brain lesions,
headaches, mood alterations, skin polyps, blindness, brain tumors,
insomnia and depression, or erode intelligence and short-term
memory. Aspartame, according to some of the most capable scientists
in the country, does. In 1991 the National Institutes of Health,
a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services, published
a bibliography, Adverse Effects of Aspartame, listing
no less than 167 reasons to avoid it.(2)
Aspartame is an DNA derivative, a combination
of two amino acids (long supplied by a pair of Maryland biotechnology
firms: Genex Corp. of Rockville and Purification Engineering
in Baltimore.(3)) The Pentagon once listed
it in an inventory of prospective biochemical warfare weapons
submitted to Congress.(4)
But instead of poisoning enemy populations,
the "food additive" is currently marketed as a sweetening
agent in some 1200 food products.
In light of the chemo-warfare implications,
the pasts of G.D. Searle and aspartame are ominous. Established
in 1888 on the north side of Chicago, G.D. Searle has long been
a fixture of the medical establishment. The company manufactures
everything from prescription drugs to nuclear imaging optical
equipment.(5)
Directors of G.D. Searle include such geopolitical
actuaries as Andre M. de Staercke, Reagan's ambassador to Belgium,
and Reuben Richards, an executive vice president at Citibank.
Also Arthur Wood, the retired CEO of Sears, Roebuck & Co.,
from the clan of General Robert E. Wood, wartime chairman of
the America First Committee.(6) America
Firsters, organized by native Nazis cloaked as isolationists,
were quietly financed by the likes of Sullivan & Cromwell's
Allen Dulles and Edwin Webster of Kidder, Peabody.(7)
Until the acquisition by Monsanto in 1985,
the firm's chairman was William L. Searle, a Harvard graduate,
Naval reservist and--a grim irony in view of aspartame's adverse
effects--an officer in the Army Chemical Corps in the early 1950s,
when the same division tested LSD on groups of human subjects
in concert with the CIA.(8)
The chief of the chemical Warfare Division
at this time was Dr. Laurence Laird Layton, whose son Larry was
convicted for the murder of Congressman Leo Ryan at Jonestown
("Come to the pavilion! What a legacy!"). Jonestown,
of course, bore a remarkable likeness to a concentration camp,
and kept a full store of pharmaceutical drugs. (The Jonestown
pharmacy was stocked with a variety of behavior control drugs:
qualudes, valium, morphine, demerol and 11,000 doses of thorazine--a
better supply, in fact, than the Guyanese government's own, not
to mention a surfeit of cyanide.(9))
Dr. Layton was married to the daughter of Hugo
Phillip, a German banker and stockbroker representing the likes
of Siemens & Halske, the makers of cyanide for the Final
Solution, and I.G. Farben, the manufacturer of a lethal nerve
gas put to the same purpose.(10) Dr. Layton,
a Quaker, developed a form of purified uranium used to set off
the Manhattan Project's first self-sustaining chain reaction
at the University of Chicago in 1942 by his wife's German-born
uncle, Dr. James Franck. At Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, Dr.
Layton concentrated his efforts, as did I.G. Farben, on the development
of nerve gasses.(11)

2. "Adverse Effects of Aspartame--January
'86 through December '90," Current Bibliography series,
National Library of Medicine pamphlet, National Institutes of
Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 1991.

7. Nancy Lisagor and Frank Lipsius, A Law
Unto Itself: The Untold Story of the Law Firm of Sullivan &
Cromwell, William Morrow (New York: 1988), pp. 137-38, 163.

8. John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian
Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control, Times Books (New York:
1979), pp. 58, 67 & 212. Marks writes that incapacitating
"large numbers of people fell to the Army Chemical Corps,
which also tested LSD and even stronger hallucinogens. The CIA
concentrated on individuals."